Why Facebook is making it harder to chat with friends

Facebook, the company that makes billions from connecting people
to each other, is about to make it harder to have a conversation.
In the coming weeks, Facebook's mobile app will be losing its chat
feature, a move that will no doubt annoy many regular users. But
the gutting likely won't end there. According to many Facebook
watchers, the end of chat is just the first cut in what could
eventually lead to the end of Facebook as a single, unified app
altogether.

Facebook notified users and confirmed to the press yesterday
that instant messaging functionality will be disappearing from its
iOS and Android apps in the coming weeks. If users want to keep
chatting, they'll have to download Facebook's separate Messenger
app. It's one thing to roll out specialised apps like Messenger,
Paper, and Camera as optional alternatives for using Facebook, but
quite another to force the issue and risk a real sacrifice in user
engagement. Some people will upgrade to the Messenger app right
away; many others will not. The net result, at least in the
short-term, will be fewer people to chat with. Why would Facebook
make that kind of sacrifice?

The resounding consensus among the Facebook experts I talked to
is that the company is finally making the jump to thinking and
acting like an app maker, a software company that keeps
functionality narrow and targeted. While users may grow attached to
services that work the way they're used to, like the full-featured
Facebook app, the growing Silicon Valley consensus is that people
really want a more bite-sized future.

Facebook: A Second-Class Experience
Facebook itself has said its flagship app dilutes the messaging
experience, which is why, according to the company, users reply to messages 20 percent
more in the Messenger app than in the main Facebook App. Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself has complained that chat inside the
Facebook app is a "second-class thing."

In a way, everything inside the Facebook app is a second-class
thing. That's why the company has been steadily breaking out big
chunks of functionality into separate apps over the past two
years.

"The Facebook experience is three experiences in one," says
Simon Khalaf, CEO of app tracking firm Flurry. "One is photo
sharing; the wall, which is news; and the third is communication.
And they've broken that up into three applications."

For photo sharing, Facebook has both Instagram and the Facebook
Photos app. For news, it has Paper. And for communication, it has
Messenger.

Building the Escape Pod
It's enough to make one wonder what functionality will be left in
the core Facebook app in a few years, once the company has
unbundled everything. In mature markets like the U.S., Facebook's
user base has essentially stopped growing. Meanwhile, as users move
from desktop Facebook to mobile Facebook, they're not necessarily
using the product as much. Instead, they sometimes turn to
competitors like SnapChat and one-time competitors like
Facebook-owned WhatsApp.

"A skeptical view of the decisions is that this is Facebook is
trying to build an escape pod to a better place as the mother ship
starts to stall out," says Eric Eldon, co-founder of Inside
Facebook, former editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, and a longtime
journalist. "A gentler one is that they're just trying to solidify
usage of a part of FB that has a lot of unrealised potential … . My
guess is that they're worried about long-term trends around the
core Facebook experience and see the popularity of rival messaging
apps interfering with Facebook in some sort of deadly way."

Either way, the move is a crystal clear indication that Facebook
is truly serious about splitting its service out into a
constellation of mobile apps. There's no question Facebook's
decision to end chat in its flagship app will be a huge near-term
blow to activity levels on its chat network. The Facebook app is
widely installed, ranking among the most downloaded apps on both
Apple and Google's app stores. And every time anyone opened that
app, they were logged in to Facebook chat -- until now.

Of course, having bought WhatsApp, Facebook can afford to take a
short-term hit in chat. After all, it just acquired around 500
million messaging users. The time is now ripe for Facebook to
transition from being an omnibus social networking website to a
factory that churns out compelling social apps, all united on the
backend by the same social graph. By relinquishing all those chat
users, at least for now, who won't migrate from the Facebook app to
Messenger, the company is making clear it won't let today's
priorities and profits hold back tomorrow's innovation. If Facebook
can continue to make bold calls like this one, it will undermine
the idea, commonly held in technology circles, that the dominant
innovators in one computing era almost inevitable are blindsided by
the next.